Wednesday, September 30, 2009

At the worst possible times things happen... so was for me two days ago.

In the morning I worked without a problem, went for lunch and when I came back my Macbook Pro didn't come out of sleep mode anymore :-(It's a Mac right, they don't break! So tried several things to reboot, but I just heard the startup sound but nothing more happened. Called John as he might have an idea, so we tried several other things, but no heartbeat in that laptop anymore...

Two hours later, went to the Apple shop and let their expert look at it. Their diagnose was the graphic card of the laptop broke and it was a common problem lately! Apple recognizes the problem and offers a free replacement and fix. So that is pretty cool...

The problem is I can't really without laptop and it would take several days (a week) to get it fixed. The Apple store couldn't give me a replacement laptop for a few days, so my only options were to use my Mac Mini (Server) or buy a new laptop.

Luckily I've a Mac Time Capsule that takes a backup of my systems every hour, so I finally decided to buy a new laptop and hoped for the best with the backups.

I must say, Time Capsule is awesome. I fired up my new laptop, got to the latest release of OSX and run the Migration Assistant (under Utilities). You tell the wizard you want to restore your machine from your Time Capsule and some time later (it had to copy a lot of GB) I was up-and-running again!

The things to remind;- Make sure you have backups, the maximum I would lose is an hour work- Make sure you remember the passwords of your Time Capsule, network etc- Create a new Admin User, it makes it easier to import the users

So is Apple cool?

It was not so cool my laptop broke, but I get it fixed for free and the backup strategy with Time Capsule works flawlessly... and it's nice to have a new laptop as well ;-)

5 comments:

I must say ever since I had to rollout a bunch of them (G4) when I did some work while studying at uni I thought they are very under-rated. It's just unfortunate it feels like a big leap after being with windows machines for so long, as is the leap to a unix style environment for day-to-day duties.

I had a similar thing happening to me (but it was my HDD that died). Luckily I could use my MacBook Air while they replaced the drive. Once I got it back, it was just a matter of restoring from the time capsule. I plugged the laptop in to the network to speed up the restore of the 100+GB.

TM is cool but a much faster restore is from a clone backup created by SuperDuper!, Carbon Copy Cloner or other tools that will do this. I update my clones on a daily basis. Takes 15-20 minutes and can easily be automated.